Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ 27 July the Soviets were moving ever closer to Warsaw’s eastern suburb, and the plan to take Praga was on course. The 2nd Tank Army overwhelmed the pathetically depleted 73rd Infantry Division, easily capturing Garwolin and taking General Frank prisoner. Further south, General Radziewsky approached Warsaw on 28 July with two tank corps, leaving a third to snake its way along the riverbank. The 69th Army began to cross the Vistula at Kazimierz Dolny. Stalin had also made sure to send the 1st Polish Army to the Warsaw area, above all for propaganda reasons; it was now outside Dęblin, waiting to help ‘liberate’ the capital.

      By 29 July the Germans’ situation appeared hopeless. The 3rd Tank Corps was outrunning the panicked men of the 73rd Infantry Division scrambling to get back across the bridges and into Warsaw; that night the Soviets severed the railway line between Warsaw and Białystok. The noose tightened further. The next place to fall was the southern suburb of Otwock – a villa colony in the pine forests originally built in the 1920s by wealthy Warsawians keen on the pleasant summer climate there. The 16th Tank Corps moved in, and despite heavy fighting destroyed the German armoured train No. 74 and began to clear the area. On the morning of 30 July the 3rd Tank Corps moved towards Zielonka, with its main force taking the city of Wołomin. The Russians now set their sights on Radzymin, a pretty neoclassical town a mere thirty-five kilometres from Warsaw.

      The bustling, leafy town of Radzymin, while most famous as the childhood home of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, has been at the centre of some of the most important battles in history. Napoleon’s army was there, as were Lenin’s and Stalin’s and Hitler’s. The 1809 Battle of Radzymin saw the Poles defeat the Austrians in a battle that set the Imperial forces reeling. In 1920 it was the location of ‘the Miracle on the Vistula’, still considered one of the most decisive battles of the twentieth century. Now the Red Army had returned. Stalin must have been wary of this approach to Warsaw, no doubt remembering the humiliation he had suffered there twenty-four years earlier. He had never quite got over the sting of Lenin’s disapproval.

      But he had no reason to worry this time. The Red Army seemed invincible. The 2nd Tank Army stood on the outskirts of Warsaw with over five hundred tanks and assault guns, and Rokossovsky’s troops were already moving into the right-bank suburb of Praga, with its red-brick factories and working-class tenements that stretched the whole length of the city. The excited Warsawians believed that they were about to be rid of the Germans once and for all, and although many were mistrustful of the Soviets, there was a tremendous sense of anticipation. Stalin, Zhukov and Rokossovsky expected Warsaw to fall as quickly as the other cities had in the race through Byelorussia. But this time they were wrong.

      Up until now the Soviet summer offensive had been a stunning success, vastly exceeding Stavka’s original expectations. In a matter of five weeks Stalin had pushed the Germans out of both Byelorussia and much of pre-war Poland, destroying an unbelievable seventeen and damaging fifty Army Group Centre divisions in the process. Bagration was the single greatest Soviet victory in numerical terms of the entire war: final estimates would put overall German losses at over a million men. Hitler had never suffered a defeat like this before, and because of it he would not be able to mount another major offensive on the Eastern Front. Now the Soviets stood a mere five hundred kilometres from Berlin. But their luck had temporarily run out. The Germans were not yet entirely beaten, and thanks to Field Marshal Model, Operation ‘Bagration’ was about to come to an abrupt end at the very gates of Warsaw.

      When Model took command of Army Group Centre on 28 June, the situation was dire. With the Soviets ripping an ever greater hole in the German front, he knew that something had to be done, and quickly. Rather than try to argue with Hitler about withdrawing and regrouping the disorganized mass fleeing Byelorussia, Model had issued orders to bring troops to the Eastern Front from wherever possible in Europe. The Russians were moving so quickly that by the time these troops began to arrive the Red Army had already crossed the pre-war Polish border. The German reinforcements could no longer be used in Byelorussia; but they could be sent to Warsaw.

      Model was in the process of amassing a considerable force, meant to include eleven tank divisions and twenty-five others, including the Grossdeutschland Division, the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf, three infantry divisions from ‘Heeresgruppe Nord’, and the 12th Panzer Division from Ukraine. Ten new grenadier divisions were promised by the command leadership of the Reserve Army, along with the 6th Panzer Division, the 19th Panzer Division and the 25th Panzer Division with the 6th Infanterie-Division. The ‘Hermann Göring’ Fallschirm-Panzer-Division was called in from Italy. Two infantry divisions, the 17th and the 73rd, were set to arrive from the Balkans and Norway, along with the new 174th Ersatz Division.⁵⁹ Many of these men took a long time to reach the front, arriving only in late July or early August, but enough had been gathered near Warsaw by 28 July to enable the first German counter-attack of the entire summer to begin. Model’s gambit would lead to the biggest tank battle on Polish soil during the entire war. It would take the Soviets by surprise, and stop them in their tracks.

      This could not have come at a worse time for the people of Warsaw. The great Bagration offensive was to be forced to an abrupt halt at the very moment the Poles began their ill-fated uprising. Model, with his successful counter-attack, would hammer the first nail into the coffin of the doomed Polish bid for freedom.

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       OSTPOLITIK

      Scipio, beholding this city, which had flourished seven hundred years from its foundation … now came to its end in total destruction. (Chapter XIX)

       The City on the Vistula

      Warsaw has the fortune – or misfortune – to be situated at the very centre of the immense flat, sandy plains of Mazowia, along the Berlin–Minsk–Moscow road. Although this vast unimpeded landscape gave the fledgling settlement great advantages in trade, the lack of natural barriers meant that it was at the mercy of any army that marched through. And march they did. Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia invaded and occupied the city numerous times, and its destiny has been written as much by foreign armies as by Warsawians themselves.

      Today, evidence of this often violent past is visible everywhere. It is there in the huge swathes of overgrown fields in Wola, where pavements and houses once stood. It is there on the ancient steps where Napoleon stood before leaving on his march on Moscow. It is there in the Tartar and Protestant and Jewish cemeteries, which stand as a testament to a history of openness, and in the beautiful Gothic and Renaissance buildings so carefully rebuilt after the war. It is also there in the hill of rubble – 121 metres high – which was created from the ruins of the city after 1945. Ghosts are everywhere, too. They meet in the Art Deco bar of the Bristol Hotel, or in the white halls of the Wolski hospital, or hover in the spaces between the 1950s housing blocks that criss-cross the former ghetto, once home to the second-largest Jewish community in the world. There, the silence is palpable.

      Ancient Warsaw started as a trading centre. Everything, from amber and fur to timber and salt, was carried by barges on the Vistula or hauled by road to Germany, Holland, Ukraine and Russia. The settlement prospered. It had become rich enough by the thirteenth century to be named a seat by the Dukes of Masovia, and before long the skyline was punctuated by the pretty rooftops of the cathedral and the red-brick church of St Mary’s, and by the merchants’ houses, churches and high walls of the Old and New Towns. In 1596 Warsaw’s star rose again when it was named capital of the now powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Polish court moved from СКАЧАТЬ